1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a fan heater and, more particularly, to a fan heater that employs a plurality of heating cartridges, each having a carbon fiber ribbon therein as a heat source and may achieve rapid and effective heating using hot air and far-infrared while reducing power consumption.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, heaters for indoor heating are classified into oil heaters, gas heaters, and electric heaters.
The oil heater or the gas heater has a more complex structure than the electric heater, causing difficulty in fabrication, and tends to pollute indoor air due to incomplete combustion of fuel. In addition, the oil heater or gas heater suffers high fire risk during injection of fuel and requires cumbersome operation for fuel injection. Particularly, a recent increase in oil prices has led to a significant increase in oil and gas costs, which burdens users of the oil heater or gas heater.
Conversely, the electric heater employs electricity as an energy source and has a simple structure, which permits easy fabrication of the heater while providing high convenience in manipulation. Additionally, the electric heater has various merits including relatively low fire risk, no requirement for frequent fuel replenishment, convenient maintenance, and the like. With such various merits, demand for electric heaters as an indoor heating means is high.
A conventional electric heater generally includes one or more transparent heat-resistant quartz tubes or opaque heat-resistant metal tubes, each of which receives a nickel chrome coil type electric heating element therein. Alternatively, the conventional electric heater includes a ceramic plate which is placed at a front position inside a case of the heater and has a tungsten wire type electric heating element received therein.
However, the electric heater including the quartz tubes or metal tubes consumes large amounts of energy, thus constituting a considerable financial burden in terms of energy expenditure. Further, since the quartz tube or metal tube has a small heat emitting area, the conventional electric heater suffers from low heat emission efficiency. Furthermore, the electric heater including the ceramic plate takes a considerable amount of time to warm to operating temperature, thereby making it difficult to achieve rapid heating.
Moreover, the conventional electric heater adopts direct heat conduction by heating air through heat emission from the quartz tube or metal tube in which the nickel chrome coil type electric heating element is received, thereby significantly deteriorating heating efficiency.